MAME and the Neo Geo Bios

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The MAME 0.202 build has added the US MVS (U4) bios (sp1-u4.bin) to it's Neo Geo bios requirements.
If you've updated to the MAME 0.202 build and your neogeo.zip is missing this file, then your Neo Geo games will fail audit and won't launch via MAME's own GUI. However, they will still play in LaunchBox. It seems that LaunchBox can be very accommodating at times.

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I updated from MAME 0.201 to 0.202 and all my Neo Geo games failed audit and refused to launch via MAME's GUI reporting that the file sp1-u4.bin was missing, but LaunchBox still launched them. When I grabbed the latest neogeo.zip with the file sp1-u4.bin included, then all the games passed audit and launched via MAME's GUI.
What else can I say?

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Are you sure you maybe didn't have a 2nd install of Mame and had LB still pointing to the old one or something ? Because if a game isn't working in the emulator outside of LB it should not be working inside of LB if everything is setup as intended.

I say this because Launchbox has no impact on the emulator working or not working beyond being properly setup in LB itself.

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I have only one install of MAME, currently MAME 0.202 build.
Perhaps someone on MAME 0.201 who has updated to 0.202 might do a test using both the MAME GUI launcher and the LaunchBox launcher before installing the latest neogeo.zip just to confirm or refute what I got?

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I'm pretty sure that MAME isn't as picky about files when using the command line vs using the UI. Just take the software list themselves as an example via command line you can launch basically any rom through MAME using LB but in the UI you must have the specific software list games for the MAME set in an archive for it to work

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My guess is that BIOS file is now part of the NEOGEO set, and hence it will fail an audit if not present.

However, if you have run the game before, and MAME has saved the specific NEOGEO BIOS you it ran with previously, it will still run since it doesn't need that new BIOS version that was added.

As a test, start your game, then go into MAME menu and change the BIOS to that new one. Quit the game and try starting again. It should fail now. (Assuming it will let you pick the newest missing BIOS)

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It's always been an intentional design that you can launch incomplete sets from command-line

Quote from a MAME Developer:

Quote

FYI, this is kind of by design.

When I added the 'bios' functionality, I made it possible to load a game so long as you had the minimum roms to launch it in a given configuration (i.e. the bios you specified was available + the game roms). This was to address a concern from Nicola that users might feel they had to track down all roms even if their hardware didn't have said revision.

However, when the internal menu was added by Aaron, it didn't take this into account, and only showed games as available if all roms were present. It never bothered me enough to change, and I consider that it's a cool secret feature that you can launch incomplete sets from the command-line...

Another option I like doing is create a neogeo.ini and chuck it in the ini folder with the following line in it: